From an article that came through the UN Development Program: a group of development workers spent some time studying Pasifika philosophy at Pasifika Communities University which underlies their approach to human development in the region. Here were some of the lessons they learned:
1. Relationality, not transactionality — Pasifika philosophies emphasize relationships over transactions. In global policymaking, this presents us an opportunity to move toward genuine reciprocity, whether between nations, communities, or sectors. In the Pacific, time is not measured in moments but in seasons and relationships.
2. Nature as kin, not resource — Pacific cultures often see the ocean, land, and skies as family. In the face of climate breakdown, this worldview offers a profound shift: protecting ecosystems is not simply environmental policy, but an act of kinship and responsibility to our Vanua*. It aligns with the principles of deep ecology and the principle of integration, which recognise the intrinsic value of all life and call for a holistic relationship with the natural world, one where human wellbeing is inseparable from the wellbeing of the planet, and our consciousness embraces every dimension of life.
3. Progress as continuity, not growth — In many Pasifika contexts, progress is measured not just by growth, but by cycles of regeneration. This stands in stark contrast to the relentless growth-at-all-costs mindset driving much of the global economy. Pasifika philosophies teach us that the beauty of Vakatabu (restraint) is not merely about the end results, but about the self-discovery in the waiting.
4. Consensus and Collective Stewardship — Decision-making in the Pacific often flows from principles such as the Fijian Veivakamareqeti (sustainability), which literally means to treasure or to keep and protect as something beloved. This care is held as a collective responsibility, a shared duty to safeguard what sustains us. Governance rooted in dialogue and consensus may move more slowly than top-down directives, but it works at the speed of trust, anchoring decisions in relationships, nurtures legitimacy, and builds long-term stability — qualities the world urgently needs in this era of polarisation.
5. Leading with Loloma (love) — In Pasifika philosophies, leadership is not a title to be worn as an ornament, but an act of service to the land and its people. True leadership is guided by loloma — a deep, relational love — anchored in connection to land, community, and spirit. Although love is rarely part of mainstream development discourse, overlooking it risks creating interventions without guardianship, autonomy, respect, and intergenerational connection.
6. Honouring Many Truths — Recognising that different perspectives can coexist without cancelling each other out. Pasifika philosophies teach us that mutual contradiction is not a weakness, but a space where diverse truths can live side by side. In this space, respect deepens, creativity flourishes, and collective wisdom grows, reminding us that value lies not in uniformity, but in the richness of many voices.
I resonate strongly with these lessons. These are core practices of dialogue work in human community and especially important values to practice and embed in work done in socially and environmentally threatened communities. The recovery of Indigenous worldviews, philosophies and approaches to land and community is essential in places where communities and land are in vulnerable states. Managerialism and exploitative capitalism sounds the death knell for these communities, both in local work, ecological sustainability and in the ways in which place like small Pacific islands bear the brunt of climate change. The voices that come from the Pacific are voices that plead for the world to change the way it think about life itself.
I live on a Pacific Island myself, within Skwxwu7mesh territory which lies beneath the imposition of Canadian law, regulations and the ways of life that have historically been at odds with the Indigenous worldview of this part of the world and the health of the ecosystems in the land and the seas around here. The recovery of the health of the inlet in which I live, Átl’ka7tsem, parallels the recovery of the strength and jurisdiction of the Squamish Nation, as prophetically documented in the book The Whale In The Door by Pauline Le Bel and Tiná7 Cht Ti Temíxw, a collection of writing from Squamish Nation members about the history and worldview of the Skwxwu7mesh uxwumixw.
In the UNDP report Upolu Lum? Vaai is quoted and I had a read through some of his work yesterday. For more of his philosophy, here are a couple of recent pieces. In Climate Change in Pasifika Relational Itulagi he writes
“This chapter argues for an ‘unburial’ of this neglected dimension [Pasifika philosophy, ethics and spirituality] which not only holds the key to constructive and sustainable solutions to the climate crisis, it also holds the key to a so-called ‘corrective balance’ of the whole human and ecological system, a kind of balance that activates self-healing and regenerative growth.”
In “We Are Therefore We Live” Pacific Eco-Relational Spirituality and Changing the Climate Change Story he explores these ideas more deeply an in the context of Christian theology as well.
I’m not sure that this shows up in the training set
About 8 years ago I remember Dave Snowden coming to Vancouver directly from a conference of security experts where they were discussing the top existential threats to humanity. In ascending order, at that time, they were: nuclear war, climate change and AI. At the time I remember thinking that how strange that seemed given that climate change is an absolute certainty and at least with nuclear war, we could actively try to prevent it. I had no idea what AI could really look like.
Nevertheless this particularly dystopian view of things had me on alert as I watched for signs that this might be happening. I am no AI expert, and the only AI I regularly and consciously interact with is ChatGPT. ChatGPT is now the best search engine out there, as everything else has become ruined by algorithms. It works, but it is also highly flawed and there is a simple reason for that: It acts like a human being.
If you’ve used ChatGPT you will be familiar with its major flaws which include approval seeking, hallucinations and, an overinflated sense of its own abilities. It will often say it can do things – like a harmonic analysis of a jazz tune – that it cannot actually do. And when it does the work and confidently provides the user with absolute garbage, my instinct is, that if it was an employee, I’d fire it. The inability to say “that is beyond my current limitations” is maddening. I was asking for this musical analysis the other day and after it couldn’t provide it, I discussed the fact that there is a price to this misplaced confidence. ChatGPT uses a tremendous amount of energy and water, and when it does so to just waste my time, I explained, there is an ethical issue here. It acknowledged that issue but it didn’t really seemed bothered by it.
That shouldn’t be a surprise because it was trained on the documented behaviours of certain classes of humans, for whom performative ethics is the norm. We do almost everything here in the global north with a detached knowledge that our ways of life are unsustainable and deeply and negatively impactful on our environment and other people but we don’t seem particularly bothered by that, nor to we display any real urgency to do anything about it.
This training is why Yuval Noah Harari is so worried in this video. AI is unlike any other tool that humans have invented in that it has agency to act and create on its own. As Harari says, printing presses cannot write their own books. But AI can, and it can choose what to write about and what not to, and it can print them and distribute them too.
The issue, and we have seen this recently with Grok, is that AI has been trained on the detritus that humans have left scattered around on the Internet. It has been raised on all the ways that we show up online. And although it has also been trained on great works of literature and the best of human thought, even though most of that material appears to have been stolen, Harari also points out that the quantity of information in the world means that only a very, very tiny proportion of it is true.
When I watched the video and then reflected on the post I wrote yesterday about difficult conversations, I had the insight that AI will know all about the stupid online conversation I started, but will know nothing about the face-to-face conversation that I later had. Harari points out, very importantly, that AI doesn’t understand trust. The reason for that, he says, is that we haven’t figured out the trust and cooperation problem in human society. That’s the one we should be solving first.
AI has no way of knowing that when there are crises in a community, human beings often behave in very beautiful ways. Folks that are at each other’s throats online will be in each other’s lives in a deeply meaningful way, raising money, rebuilding things, looking after important details. There is no way that AI can witness these acts of human kindness or care at the scale with which it also processes the information record we have left online. It sees the way we treat each other in social media settings and can only surmise that human life is about that. It has no other information that proves otherwise.*
For me, this is why face-to-face work is critically important. Meetings are just not the same over zoom. We cannot generate the levels of trust on zoom that we can by spending a significant amount of time in physical proximity to one another. Face-to-face encounters develop contexts of meaning – what I have called dialogic containers – and it is in those spaces and times that we develop community, trust, friendship, sustainable commitment and, dare I say, peace. The qualities of living that we ascribe to the highest aspirations for human community are only generated in their fullness in person. They require us to work through the messiness of shared life-spaces, the conflict of values and ideas and paths forward, the disagreements and confusions, by creating multiple ways in which we encounter and relate to one another. Sustainable community life requires us to see one another in multiple identities so that we discover that there are multiple possibilities for our relationships, multiple ways we can work around blockages and unresolvable conflict.
We are fast losing this capability as human beings. When people ask me to work with their groups there is always the lingering question of whether we can do the work of three days in two, and the work of two days in one. The answer is no. We can do different work in limited times and spaces. Narrowing the constraints on the act of making meaning together creates more transactional relationships based on incresingly incomplete and inaccurate information. This is world we are showing to AI agents. The actual human world is also relational, multi-faceted, subtle and soaked with meaning. As we feed our robots a particular picture of ourselves it’s possible that we are also becoming that very picture. Depth of relationship and meaning becomes replaced with a smeared, shallow breadth of connections and transactions.
There is no better way – no faster way, even – to develop trust than to be together. I think this is so true that it certainly is axiomatic to my practice and how I live my life. And if trust is the critical “resource” we need as human beings, to not only live well but to also address the existential threats that we face – which are all entirely created from our own lack of trust – then being together face-to-face working, playing, singing, struggling, discussing, and figuring stuff out is the most radical act of hope and generosity we can make, to ourselves and to our descendants.
I suppose there will always be a top three list of threats to human existence, but it would be nice if those top three were things like “sun goes supernova” or “super volcano blankets the earth in decades of darkness” and not actions for which we are entirely responsible.
* It also occurs to me that alien cultures who are able to pick up and understand the electronic signals we have been radiating towards every planet within 100 light years of ours will also get a very particular picture of who we are as a civilization. Never mind what was on the Voyageur record. Monday’s TV news has already overtaken it.
Peter Levine shared a video today of a panel he was on back in June, discussing practical ways to have difficult conversations. We could all do with a little more practice in this these days. I know I certainly could.
I found the audio hard to hear, but Peter’s post helpfully summarizes what each presenter practices, and I have gathered these principles here in a list for future reference. Each person is working in a different context, but the gathering was about teaching civics in schools in the United States. I think there is some useful transferrance of these principles, so I’m going to slightly rephrase them to be more general.
- Ground discussions in shared principles, such as living well together or a desire to find common ground
- Explore tensions (such as between equality and liberty(
- Use historical rather than current examples.
- Let the other lead.
- Set norms for addressing identities
- Allow a person to opt-out of “representing” a group
- Take responsibility for imbalances in credibility
- Give full attention to the other
- Practice receptivity, curiosity and open-heartedness
- Allow long pauses to allow quieter voices to emerge
- Make the conversation multi-centred, in other words allow it to become a real conversation rather than a mediated exchange of ideas through one person with power in the situation.
- Ask “What are you concerned about?” to uncover core values
- Legitimate concerns without needing to agree with them.
- Ground the discussion in a shared moral foundation
- Understanding your own philosophical, moral or ethical principles can help you generate good questions.
- Listen for understanding, not debate or attack.
Peter Levine (my summary , because he doesn’t cover his own talk in his post!)
- Name your own biases and make them visible
- Find a share ground of values
- Ask questions that are neither too abstract but also not settled.
- Explore unresolvable tensions
I recently found myself in a difficult conversation and I handled it really badly. It stemmed from a poor comment I made on a social media post during an election campaign where I accused my interlocutor of posting a hoax becasue a meme he shared did not reflect the data that was contained in the report it referenced. I know this person in real life, and the conversation did not go well online. When I saw him in real life, I apologized. A few days later we found ourselves together in the community and we started discussing the point of the post he made. It became a dogfight. I was triggered and upset, feeling some shame and guilt that I had kicked this whole thing off with what he perceived as a personal attack online. For his part, he is a lawyer, so the conversation became a debate, both of us convinced we were right. I was without any kind of skillfulness in creating a good curiosity based conversation. It wasn’t a proud moment.
Practicing these kinds of conversations is incredibly hard. None of us are saints. Principles like the ones above are just basic good sense for anyone hosting or participating in a difficult conversation, but they are incredibly difficult to remember and practice when we are in an emotional state and when the conversations we are having may ultimately have existential implications for the folks in the discussion.
I think at the end of the day one of the key principles that is my own personal responsibility to take is “I want this to go well, for me and the person I’m talking too.” I don’t mean that we should avoid conflict and just be civil to each other, or that we should deny any part of our emotional response to a situation. What I mean is that we should embrace a relationship, even if only for a few minutes, that can hold different experiences, different points of view and different aspiration side by side. For that we need a practice ground and before we step out onto that mat, we need some principles to guide us.
Here are some. What are yours?
My first facilitation teacher, Bruce Elijah.
I have told this story for decades but finally wrote it down today.
Back in 1992 I was working in Ottawa for the National Association of Friendship Centres. One of the Elders that worked closely without Board and staff was Bruce Elijah. Bruce is a wonderful Elder, brilliant leader, and teacher, raised in his traditional Oneida culture. His heart is unlimited in its goodness.
There was a day when I needed to facilitate a conversation on creating a domestic violence prevention program with a number of our member organizations from across the country and representatives of the federal government who were responsible for funding the effort. I was dreading the conversation, both because of the emotional weight of the conversation and the high stakes nature of the day. I turned to advice to Bruce. He gave me the briefest of facilitation trainings. He handed me the eagle feather that our organization used as a talking piece and he said “The Creator gave us two gifts — circle, and story. Use them.” And that was it.
When I arrived in the meeting room at a hotel in downtown Ottawa, it was set up with tables arranged in a hollow square, water and notepads in front of each chair and all facing one small table that I was supposed to sit at. With Bruce’s words in my ears, I did the unthinkable and had the staff reset the room with just a circle of about 24 chairs. When the participants arrived for the work, they were slightly taken aback by the room set up, but many of our members who had travelled from their communities expressed relief that the room looked different from traditional federal government consultations.
When we were ready to begin, an Elder gave us a prayer to bless our day and I introduced the day with a short speech about how we had gathered to generate ideas about a domestic violence prevention program and I knew that everyone in this room had some stories to tell about what that kind of program might mean to them and the people they served. I then invited people to share those stories and passed the feather to the person on my left.
By the time the feather got back to me, it was lunch time. Over three hours we heard stories of deep despair, of hope, of desperate need. We heard personal stories of violence and abuse, and stories of relatives and loved ones who had suffered at the hands of their intimate partners. We had humour as well, jokes and asides and situations so absurd that they were laughable. By the time lunch rolled around it was impossible to tell who were community workers and who were federal government workers; the issue was pervasive and crossed every line.
After lunch we repeated the process although this time I asked “we heard these powerful stories this morning. What then should we do about this?” Again the feather travelled its slow journey around the circle and this time everyone shared ideas about how such a program would look in their community, what it would enable, what kind of change it might make.
During these conversations my only job was to capture pages and pages of notes that I later turned into a report that informed the establishment of the off-reserve portion of the Aboriginal Family Violence Initiative. It was a powerful way to make policy and also a powerful way to create commitment between people. We watched the bones of a federal government program emerge out of an empty circle and a collection of stories. Bruce was right: this indeed was the gift of creation.
That was some years before I stumbled on Open Space Technology and more formalized processes of large scale dialogue. But it taught me that simple constraints — a circle, a feather, a question — could result in profound outcomes. It taught me to make space for stories of the heart and deeply personal experiences. It taught me that attending to relationality was as important as attending to outcomes. Perhaps most importantly, it taught me that there is hardly anything more powerful and profound than a group of human beings making meaning together in a life-giving context.
Don’t build beautiful things that need to capture life before they are functional. Start with life.